Earlier quoted context omitted.
UTF-8, Unicode.
And how do you represent line breaks?
For most users, you press enter/return on your keyboard. A lot of text editors will detect line endings when opening a file and use that going forward.
The future of education is plain text
121–130 of 349 posts
Re: The future of education is plain text
#122Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…
>With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.
And plain text is itself a nightmare to parse and do anything beyond reading it as a block.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#123Plaintext OrgMode notebooks exhibit every benefit listed in Minimaxir's [0] post, and have the additional advantage of powerful editor integration beyond R code. Here is an example of using the IPython kernel to evaluate inline Python code within an OrgMode document.[1][2] More information on how to create multi-language notebooks with OrgMode Babel here[3] [0] http://minimaxir.com/2017/06/r-notebooks/ [1] http://kit…
Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of nesting, the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.
Not using those other editors is an added benefit.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#124I recently wrote a book using Libreoffice and Microsoft Word, because the publisher demanded it. The process took about a year. My own estimate is that we lost about 2-3 months to tool-related problems, without any benefit whatsoever. I have never in my 20 year career understood the point of word-processing tools, and never will. And those tools make money. That is wrong.
Would you have had tool problems if you had just went with Word?
To be devil's advocate, that's like the recipient stating something like: "sorry, we only accept manuscripts in blue ink, and not black ink (not for functional reasons, just historical reasons/habits".
Re: The future of education is plain text
#125I would hope that the future of education is not plain text and lectures! Computers can generate powerful methods of interaction. Why limit them to being worse than physical paper?
Re: The future of education is plain text
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could replace "plain text" in the article with "non-binary", and it would probably make more scence. Markdown is also not plain text in the most strict sense. Or HTML is plain text in a vague sense. In the end, what really matters is how easy it is to build parsers and tools for a format. Being non-binary is a huge plus. I think that was the point of the article, and I agree with that.
I don't think anyone would claim that HTML was easy to parse, would they? It took decades for the HTML5 consensus to emerge. I like text-based formats, but I'm not convinced that "Being non-binary is a huge plus" for parsing. With binary formats you can assume that documents are generated by a tool, which is at least trying to be compliant with a spec, so barfing on noncompliance is more acceptable. With text you hav…
Parsing semistructured text as markup is a problem solved over 30 years ago [1].
SGML has the SHORTREF feature which allows custom Wiki syntaxes such as markdown, but also casual math. It works by applying a context-dependent (parent element dependent) mapping of tokens (such as the `_` token for markdown emphasis) to replacement text (eg. the `` start-element tag). Within the `` context, the `_` token is mapped to the `` end-element tag, in turn, ending the emphasis. In combination with tag omission/inference (such as in HTML) and other markup minimization and processing features, SGML is a quite powerful plain text document authoring format.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La...
Re: The future of education is plain text
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of nesting, the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.
Not using those other editors is an added benefit.
Not unless you work alone. When you work with other people, it's important to use a common format for the benefit of the group. Trying to force other people to use emacs won't win you any friends.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#128May I share a related vignette? I have a kid in middle school, and he has a tablet. These things are often pushed as "educational". Pop quiz: you walk by, and you need to determine, within a couple of seconds, if what he's doing is actually educational. Here's what you see: lots of graphics, whizzing around the screen -or- black alphanumeric characters against a white background Now, you don't actually know , but gen…
Or the student could be a visual learner.
Learning styles are a myth, don't you know? https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....
And there are many more such studies available with a simple search.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
PDFs are still ok though. There are many implementations of PDF parsers, many Open Source. It may not be as "universal" as plain-text, but it is definitely universal. At this point, I believe that all major operating systems ship with the ability to open PDFs for display.
PDFs seem to render poorly on ebook readers.
Mainly because the layout code (Postscript?) in the PDF file assumes an A4 or US letter sized page. Most PDFs just cannot handle being reflowed.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#130As others have mentioned, once you dig into the innards and nuances of plain text representations and formats, things can get hairy. Still, I think the author is correct in that plain text formats are certainly a better base for sharing curricula, and for knowledge production in general, than something proprietary like word docs, pdfs, etc. I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert…
> I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert into other formats and deliciously human readable are the way to go. I believe that MediaWiki, AsciiDoc or LaTeX are particularily well-suited for this purpose. MediaWiki is already widely known and widely used for knowledge accumulation, namely, in Wikipedia. The downside is, of course, that this wiki language has quite some limitations.…
The big upside to Markdown is that unprocessed readability is fully first-class; if something doesn't provide at least some utility when reading the raw document, then it doesn't exist. Of course, that's also one of its downsides.